Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Wrong anyway It doesn’t matter wot

Yeah. Love you, Turtle. See you sometime, I hope.

U aren’t going 2 talk 2 me again??? Is that wot this means????

She cut the connection.

In another building not so far away, Louise took a mouthful of whisky from her silver hip flask in the luxury of solitude, and decided that whatever chaos the boss was surrounded by at the moment, he needed to know this. She called him.

In her room, Lucy sat on the bed holding the picture of the woman, Grace. She could not see the face clearly in the light. She checked her watch and thought, yes, the building’s gone by now, and whatever else might have been burned because of it. They would be out there picking up the bits, all of them, including Turtle’s father. Lucy left the picture on the bed, took the phone and her gun and went out, to Belmore Park.

She felt afraid of nothing as she walked through deserted streets flooded with sheets of water. She crossed the wide intersection on Elizabeth Street and walked through the underpass to Eddy Avenue.

There was almost no traffic. At Central Station, yellow lights glowed under the colonnade where people slept like bundles of dirty clothing in alcoves and niches. No one looked at her. With her hood pulled over her head, she was as anonymous and ragged as anyone here. Further along the colonnade, a woman and two men began to fight. One man and the woman beat the other man and tore at his clothes. Their voices echoed harshly at a distance but she could not understand what was being said, all she heard were curses. Soon the police would come by to break them up. The possibility caused Lucy no concern. She felt that nothing could touch her, in her mind she walked through this place unseen, less than a ghost.

She crossed into Belmore Park and stood in the middle of the open space between the Moreton Bay fig trees where she had last seen Greg.

The gazebo had a dull fluorescence in the city’s partial darkness. She looked up and thought she saw a flying fox outlined against the sky.

She waited with the world in balance, believing that in the next second, at the next turning of the earth’s curvature, it might tip into nothing.

Time might really end and there would be a way out of this without her having to do anything more. There seemed to be a cessation of all movement. There was only the sound of rain dripping from the trees, then quietness. The voices of the people on the other side of the road were silenced. Instinctively, she thought that it had happened, that this was the quiet that comes before the world is broken open and there is no more time. She waited, hardly breathing. She was light, floating.

Then the gap closed around her and time returned. A car driven too fast along Eddy Avenue came to a halt at the traffic lights at Pitt Street, skewed to one side. A night train rumbled past on the tracks which spanned the overhead bridge. Across the road under the colonnade she saw two police officers weighing into the fight she had seen start and heard the shouts and curses once again. She smiled sardonically. There was only this time and this place to be dealt with.

She walked out of the park and across the road, turning her back on the police almost within their sighting distance, and went back to her sanctuary. She looked at her watch. Soon it would be dawn and the start of that brand new day Graeme had promised her.

The blue and red lights of the fire engines flashed on the wet roads while firemen spread their hoses out around the white building, dousing the flames. The takeaway shop next door was flaming greasy fire and its window crashed outwards from the heat. The smoke had driven the residents from the block of flats on the other side of the clinic out into the street. Some had had to be evacuated, to their confusion. Huddles of dazed, damp people found themselves marooned on the wet streets, wrapped in blankets over their nightclothes while the media circled them like hungry dogs. They had got here at speed, as they always did; Harrigan wished his people could be as efficient. The television crews were unpacking their goods on the other side of the fire engines, their stand-up comics were getting ready for their routines in front of the cameras. The scene was a mess of umbrellas and damp people bumping against one another.

‘Keep them out of the way. I don’t want to have to worry about those clowns,’ Harrigan grumbled to the uniformed officers before going in search of the senior sergeant in charge of the local patrol.

‘Where were the security guards?’ he asked her. ‘My information was that this clinic was under twenty-four-hour surveillance.’

‘So was mine. Don’t know where they were, but they weren’t here, that’s for sure,’ she replied sharply. She glanced across the road. ‘Look at that mess, will you? They should put the scum who did that in gaol and throw away the key.’

‘If we hadn’t got here when we did, we’d have had deaths,’

Harrigan said. ‘You can tell them that at Area Command. You can tell them it came from me, personally.’

‘I will. No probs.’ She grinned with pleasure at the prospect and walked away.

On the other side of the road, all traffic was being diverted to the southbound lane and waved on its way by uniformed police. It was dawn, the morning snarl was beginning to build, already stretching towards the beach suburbs in the south and the city in the north. It grew light on a snake-like mess of fire hoses, burnt-out buildings still smouldering in the damp weather, and convoys of vehicles taking those left homeless to temporary shelter. Harrigan watched his team stop for takeaway coffee, saw Grace light a cigarette and roll her shoulders wearily. He wanted to speak to her but did not know what he could say. It was twenty-four hours since any of them had had any real sleep other than a stolen hour or two.

In the midst of this, he took a phone call from the surveillance team watching the Temple to hear that the preacher had arrived home on foot. He told them to leave the man alone and hung up, wondering what Fredericksen had done with his time between midnight and dawn, or what he might have been able to tell them about the scene surrounding him now. He was then surprised to take a phone call from the Commissioner’s Office. When he had finished talking, he went looking for Trevor.

‘I’ve got to take the car, mate. I’ve been summonsed by God, he wants to have breakfast with me. I’ll see you all back in town.’

‘Have fun, Boss. Don’t forget to say g’day to the Commissioner for me while you’re there. What does he want with us anyway?’

‘Who knows? I’ve been told it might take a while. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.’

Why did they want him? Presumably to explain why he had permitted a firebombing to occur in the middle of a state election campaign, not a very clever thing to do. He got into the car with the premonition that events were about to become more complicated than they already were. As he drove away, he saw a dark blue van come to a slow stop on the other side of the road near the blue and white ribbons.

Acme Security. We’re there for you. He looked at the car’s digital clock: seven forty-five a.m. Daylight hours. Welcome to the job, boys. Ask me for a reference one day.

Some time after Harrigan had been ushered into the Commissioner’s office, Lucy stood in her room overlooking the alleyway that led from the street, methodically checking her watch. Finally, she put on her coat and slipped her gun into one pocket and her mobile telephone into another. She thought she was weighted to one side, dragged down like someone about to drown themselves. She pulled up her hood to hide her face and went out, leaving everything else behind, hurrying down the back stairs and exiting through a small loading dock.